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I don't see where adverse possession figures into it. The basic problem is actually very common in agrarian populations and not unique to Hawaii. Dad owns plot of land. Brother A gets half, Brother B gets half. Brother A's two kids get 1/4 each, as do Brother B's two kids. A lot of the kids leave the land, but retain an ownership interest, and eventually you end up with two acres that have dozens of owners. It's a huge problem on indian reservations, for example: https://www.doi.gov/news/pressreleases/interior-standing-roc....

A quiet title action and partition by sale is not a "legal hack." A quiet title action is a structured process for unifying title while compensating people with ownership interests. And because a single clear title in a property is much more valuable than a bunch of possessory interests in the same property (even put together), partition by sale maximizes the value of the land. So each person's share of the auction proceeds will be more than the market value of their original possessory interests.

None of this is indicative of anything being "broken." It's basically unavoidable so long as fractional interests in land and subdivision of interests on inheritance are permitted.

I thought that adverse possession is what allows brother A to sell without the permission of brother B's distant grandchild.

But as I said, I know only what I've learned via today's jetlag + modafinil fueled googling session.

When dad dies and brother A and brother B each get half the land, they end up as joint tenants. Even if brother B then moves away and brother A uses the whole property for himself, adverse possession won't apply, unless brother A gives brother B "unequivocal" notice of his intention to claim sole ownership of the property. (Adverse possession between joint tenants requires a much more aggressive show of sole ownership than adverse possession generally.)

But brother A can still sell his interest in the land. Whoever buys it steps into brother A's shoes--they're joint tenants with brother B (or his descendants). That's basically what Zuckerberg did. And as a joint tenant, he can seek a partition, which basically tells the court "hey, I don't want to share possession of this land, auction it and cash out everyone's interest."

Thanks for the clarification. That's really helpful.

> Without this hack it might be difficult/impossible for a land owner to know with any certainty that they actually own the land they just purchased.

Such a need for strict definition of ownership (beyond any natural meaning) is the actual colonialism as felt by the indigenous

If clear ownership existed beforehand, then the conflict would never have occurred. Now that clear ownership will be established, all future conflict can be avoided or quickly solved. Ownership, regardless of who owns it provides a path to resolution.

In societies that value social cohesion: the conflict can be avoided in a manner that is not 'zero-sum' in the manner property rights are.

Without passing judgement on pros or cons; if someone from a foreign land xomes to you and insists that you adopt their ways of dealing with ownership and abandon your own, that is colonialism.

Rephrasing GP with emphasis:

> Such a need for strict definition of ownership (beyond any natural meaning) is the actual colonialism as felt by the indigenous

You're missing the point that the framework of exclusive ownership is not universally applicable. Try applying your reasoning to eg administration of the atmosphere.

The same type of colonization is happening to our information environment via the imposition of "imaginary property".

> Try applying your reasoning to eg administration of the atmosphere.

You mean in terms of airspace? Because that's a thing but it ends at space, which nobody owns. It's a system that works pretty well.

I meant in regards to consuming oxygen - privatization via strict property rights would imply the bottling of it all, to everyone's detriment.

But airspace is a good example too of something that has not been formally divided up with property rights. We would only say that USG "owns" the airspace as a way of understanding within the malapplied framework - it doesn't accurately describe the situation on its own merits.

(And FWIW this non-ownership is starting to show its cracks with the advent of high density batteries and cheap brushless motor controllers ("drones"). This situation in Hawaii seems like the equivalent of an airport suing to gain exclusive title over all airspace it currently mediates, trampling over all the rest of the existing airspace users)

This is my understanding of the situation as well. If this action wasn't taken the land could potentially never see use. I think Zuck is a scumbag, but this is as much a broken legal system's fault as his.

I think that possibly the amount of land he's claiming for personal use could be a problem as well. But this too is an option available to him under the law.

Land owned in the commons, by community, or with a large group of people is hardly a new concept. It seems a broken legal concept because it has become uncommon now, but it was a very common way to hold land just a few centuries ago:

Please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

This whole situation also reminds me a bit of the Vogons destroying earth:

"There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. ... What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams."

This is not common land though. If it was it could just be owned by the government (like national parks) and that would work fine.

This is private land owned by a large number of people (many of who might not even realize it).

This is a legitimate and reasonable process that occurs frequently in mainland US as well. Especially if you purchase land at auction. Part of the process involves publishing efforts to ensure that all potentially affected parties are made aware of the action.

Creditors are hesitant to deal with any questionable land until title has been quieted by this process so they know the purchaser has full ownership and there can be no further disputes. The quiet title process is a request for all those with interest in the land to speak up and resolve the situation.

This prevents, for example, handing out a construction mortgage for someone to build a home on the land and then realizing three years later that your collateral is in jeopardy because several entities have decided to dispute the mortgagee's right to that land after the home was built.

I once heard someone describe law as simply software for people. I love how you describe these maneuvers as hacks.

That is a common misconception, especially amongst engineers. There's a large cohort of smart people who've read a contract and think this means they grasp the law; but without understanding jurisprudence or equity, common/case law, the myriad forms of legislation, actual legal proceedings &c &c.

In reality the law is not a programming language, and trying to treat it as such is a common cause of disappointment, frustration, anger, needless bickering, extended conflict, and vexatiously long and mostly unenforceable contracts.

I agree. I used to look at contracts as a series of logical statements with conditionals, inheritance, etc.

After going through an extremely nasty contract dispute I learned that contracts have limited value and that I should never trust anyone, even if 4 lawyers reviewed the terms.

> There's a large cohort of smart people who've read a contract and think this means they grasp the law; but without understanding jurisprudence or equity, common/case law, the myriad forms of legislation, actual legal proceedings &c &c.

There's a large cohort of smart people who've read a program and think this means they grasp its semantics; but without understanding the language specification, compiler bugs, undefined behavior implementation, posix specification, operating system bugs and configuration of deployment environment.

I don't see why you're getting downvoted here, because the analogy is pretty apt.

Much like programming languages, law language has evolved to be written in a way that's unambiguous as possible. Like programming languages, contracts and the like don't succeed in having 100% predictable semantics.

One source of unpredictability of results comes from the lack of a stable, 100% predictable execution platform (namely, judges, juries, lawyers, and current case law and legislation), much like compilers and platforms do not 100% specify their behavior, or even when they do, the run-time behavior is not perfectly predictable (e.g. when does the GC run).

Another source of unpredictability is that law at the end of the day must interface with the non-legal world ('facts' vs. law) and so touches global context which isn't known when the law or contract was drafted, which one might compare to dealing with unforeseen interactions with the OS, deployment environments, user input, etc.

So while laws and programs try to accurately and precisely encode their own internal semantics, they sometimes fail because they depend on other things that don't have perfectly defined semantics.

Agreed. One of the most startling discoveries I had about contracts was the concept of "consideration", i.e. that both parties of a contract should be getting something of roughly equal value. Without consideration, the contract becomes unenforceable. Prior to learning that, I viewed contracts as a set of rules, and if you didn't like the rules you agreed to, well, you lost at the contract game. Consideration turned out to be the first of a lot of contract concepts I didn't know of (and doubtless there are many concepts I still don't know about).

My ex went to law school, and I found the attitude of "non-lawyers have no business having opinions about the law" that her law school promoted to be vile. That said, I've found that it's a good idea to assume that any legal issue is NOT straightforward. Doing otherwise usually ends up making me look ignorant, and has me spreading false conclusions to other non-lawyers around me.

> something of roughly equal value

The value doesn't have to be equal, simply that both sides offer something of value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration#Monetary_value_o...

Many record contracts are overturned once the person gets famous. I was told this was usually due to consideration issues, though I don't know that is a fact.

They are more like standards documents for people. They are often thought to be unambiguous, but they frequently end up with multiple competing interpretations.

I would describe the law as "spaghetti code" with a lot of side effects and undefined behavior :-)

I would describe it more like Sabre (Airline booking system). Where there are so many different rules you end up some crazy pricing rules cause there are just like a million different rules evolved over time, and no really knows why it happens.

> Without this hack it might be difficult/impossible for a land owner to know with any certainty that they actually own the land they just purchased.

If they are owned by rich people, maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe it's a way to spread their wealth to the lesser fortunate. Heh.

The legal process here also spreads wealth around, just in a more liquid form. Rather than owning 1/16 of some parcel of land completely enclosed by Zuckerberg's compound, the lesser fortunate will get cash instead.

But if they actually had the parcel they could negotiate with the billionaire himself which would lead to a better pay-off. Which would be the main problem that this system circumvents. The secondary problem is those pesky natives coming on your land. There is that Silicon Valley billionaire dealing with that in California if I remember, Kholsa, in his case it's so they can access the public beach.

Looks like Zuck is getting in front of those problems by preemptively building a wall around the property: http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/29/technology/mark-zuckerberg-w...

The wall is built and the locals are pissed

It's a bad thing. It prevents people from investing in developing the land.

Areas without a clear title tend to be poor because as soon as someone tries to build a factory, workshop, business, or even just a nice house they're hit with multiple lawsuits.

It's kept that land from becoming a strip mall.

Development isn't an unambiguous good. It's very possible the owners are happier with possession of family land over whatever sum of money they could get.

Though this is true to some extent. In the end the richest areas are not those that open themselves up to development via foreign investment. It's those that create a ton of protectionism and develop the resources themselves. Countries like China and South Korea. Probably why local Hawaiians are extremely poor while the rich gobble up the land. Foreign investment can take you a step up. To move beyond that you need local development. Local developers would need to develop the land with local workers, and sell out small parcels for a lot of money. Think 1,000 million dollar houses on the same plot Zuckerberg bought for 100 million.

A nitpick, but local Hawaiians are not, generally speaking, extremely poor. They are, for the most part, fairly typical Americans. They and other long term locals face the same problems that locals in all desirable areas face: outsiders coming in with money and driving up prices.

This is with good intentions but simply not true. Someone driving up prices is very different than from someone stealing land handed down from your ancestors. This is a forced sale and effectively removes Hawaiians from the land giving it to a rich mainlander.